PoB: https://pobb.in/GFTKHcEqs6RH

At my gear level right now a week into the league with plenty of room for improvement, I have:

- 9 million DPS on high end ignite, kept up permanently by defiled forces anointed on mercenary. 6 million on average ignite.

- 18k phys / 56k ele / 30k chaos max hit with no guard skill

- 4 endurance charges, fortify

- 75%/76% block with a staff with 2% life/2% es on block from staff mastery

- 800 life regen, could easily be more

- 2 button build, lvl 20 flammability and lvl 1 flame surge automated via battlemage's cry, enduring cry self casted every 10 seconds

This was my league starter, I made the initial PoB almost a year ago and waited for 3.26, and the buffs to Elementalist, especially golems, were huge.

3.26 fixed a bunch of issues I had no way of dealing with before:

- Chaos golem fixes chaos res

- Lightning golem fixes mana regen and attack speed

- Flame golem fixes AoE radius, allowing you to drop convergence

- Stone golem gives a ton of extra life regen

- 40% phys as fire from Shaper of Flames makes it easy to get a good phys max hit, which was near impossible to do efficiently before when using Bronn's Lithe

- The new Skitterbots belt means you can get a 27% shock from them on top of a 17% scorch, meaning you do not need Shaper of Storms at all.

This freed up 2 entire ascendancy notable slots, one for elemental aegis and one for golems. Basically 3.26 was a huge patch for melee ignite and I'm having a blast here.

The only mercenary buffs in the PoB are lvl 1 elemental weakness, you can get way more (eye of malice on mercenary is 15% more dmg for example, kaom's binding gives 30% more physical max hit, etc)

I think LSoG is the best melee ignite skill right now, even better than eviscerate because it's not conditional and you can easily get +7 to gem level from a corrupted Bronn's Lithe. It is also trivially easy to craft a huge 2h staff because no one uses elemental staves so the fractures cost nothing.

Overall this is a super fun mapping build that I played since first lab all the way to endgame. Currently I'm farming juiced t16 memory influence and t17s. Single target is not amazing but it's good enough at my current gear level for anything but ubers, as long as you don't give t17 bosses like +300% more life from map mods. Catarina is very annoying to fight as always, the other 3 are easy though.

I imagine that with enough investment you could probably get this up to around 15 million dps+, which is enough to do ubers just for the challenge though not enough to farm them efficiently.